Citizendium turns five, but the Wikipedia fork is dead in the water

Five years ago this month, Larry Sanger caused a stir when he launched a fork of Wikipedia, the site he helped create in 2001. Sanger believed Wikipedia had fatal weaknesses that could only be fixed by making a clean break from the past. He had devised a new editing process he hoped would allow his new site to eventually surpass the original.

It hasn't turned out that way. After a burst of initial enthusiasm, the site plateaued and then began to steadily decline. The site now has fewer than 100 active members, with only about a dozen of them making edits on a typical day.

To mark the site's fifth birthday, Ars talked to two people who have been deeply involved with the Citizendium project: Sanger himself and Hayford Peirce, a science fiction author who is currently a member of the site's editorial council. Both readily conceded that the site had fallen short of expectations. Read on for their candid assessments of what went wrong, and what we can learn from the experience.

"Little by little these people dropped out"

Wikipedia was Sanger's brainchild, but he left the project the year after it started. He disliked what he called the "ill-mannered geeks" who had come to dominate the site. And he came to believe that Wikipedia's completely open editing process gave insufficient deference to credentialed experts. He worried that if they were "forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts," they would burn out and stop contributing to the site altogether.

So Sanger announced a new project called Citizendium. It began as a fork of Wikipedia, but the site "unforked" in 2007, deleting imported Wikipedia articles that had not yet been modified on Citizendium.

Citizendium's launch prompted a great debate about the merits of Wikipedia's radically democratic editing process. In a widely-read essay, Clay Shirky attacked Sanger's fundamental premise that Wikipedia was hampered by its failure to properly defer to credentialed experts. Shirky argued that the key to Wikipedia's success was that it was focused on peer-review of edits themselves, rather than than the people making them. He predicted that Citizendium would get bogged down in fights about who qualified as an expert, which would waste time and generate ill will that would hamper the site's growth.

Shirky's predictions turned out to be prescient, at least if Hayford Peirce's telling of the Citizendium story is accurate. According to Peirce, the site attracted a number of prominent academics interested in contributing content. However, he said, these academics were "having long, ongoing fights with Larry about certain fields of expertise." Academics clashed with Sanger over esoteric topics such as animal taxonomy. "Do we call a lion a lion or a felix something or other. Professor types fight about it. Little by little these people dropped out," Peirce said. Today, only a handful of academics remain regular contributors.

Peirce also thinks that the site's processes were unduly complex, especially given the small size of the Citizendium community. "There were nominations for a charter-writing board and an election," he said. "There were some really strange people elected to it. They labored away for six months or so, and fought with each other, and a couple of them stopped working." Peirce says that by the time the charter was finished, there were only 40 to 50 people around to vote on it.

Peirce's story is backed up by Citizendium's official statistics, which show that the rate of article creation has declined precipitously over the last two years. At its peak in 2009, Citizendium boasted almost 30 new articles per day. Today, the rate has fallen to around 2 articles per day.

"We haven't given up yet"

Sanger is not as optimistic about Citizendium as he was on the site's one-year anniversary, when he was still predicting a "coming explosion of growth" in the site's contributors. He kept his promise to step down as site leader after two to three years in order to avoid becoming a "dictator for life." And he says he no longer contributes content to the site.

Still, Sanger is bullish on Citizendium's accomplishments. "We essentially proved that there is another way to use wikis," Sanger said. "Had Wikipedia started with a model somewhat closer to Citizendium, I think it would have been a much better project, both in terms of management and quality of content."

What went wrong? Sanger argues that the primary problem was Wikipedia's overwhelming first-mover advantage. "As long as Wikipedia is a top ten site, it's going to be difficult for a competitor to get any traction," Sanger told Ars. "A lot of people are going to try to draw the conclusion that there's something about the model which meant that it couldn't take off. I really don't think that's the case. The model works very well in many ways."

Today, the prospect of Citizendium overtaking Wikipedia seems pretty remote. Was Clay Shirky right that Citizendium was undone by its unwieldy editing model, or was it doomed from the start by Wikipedia's first-mover advantage? I've long been in the Shirky camp, and Peirce's comments lend some credence to Shirky's predictions. At the same time, it's hard to say Sanger got a fair test of his model. By 2006 Wikipedia had so much momentum that it would have been hard for any alternative, no matter how well-designed, to gain traction.

Either way, Citizendium's future looks grim. "I personally think the site is going to fail unless someone like Larry comes up with a sugar daddy who will be able to pay 300, 400, or 500 per month just to keep the servers going," Peirce told Ars.

"We haven't given up yet," counters Sanger. "We don't intend to any time in the foreseeable future. As long as there are people interested in building Citizendium, I'm going to make sure, one way or another, that the servers stay on."

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits

I've never heard of this before today and it does sound like a great idea.

They need a better name or a uniqueish nickname, when I want to look something up on wiki. I go to my search bar type in wiki and whatever I want to look up, and go to the first hit because that's what I was looking for.

Peirce said: "There were nominations for a charter-writing board and an election," he said. "There were some really strange people elected to it. They labored away for six months or so, and fought with each other, and a couple of them stopped working."

That's a disingenuous comment coming from Hayford Peirce given that he was nominated to the charter writing committee, turned down the nomination, then nominated the same people he called "strange", only to stand back and criticise it after they were elected. That's really poor form.

Tim, as the author of the article you should have interviewed someone other than Hayford Peirce, who of course, consistently refuses to shoulder any responsibility on why citizendium failed to take off. I'm sure David Finn, Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Howard C. Berkowitz and many other people who were once on their committees and councils would have a more objective view on what was the real reason why the project has fallen and looks likely to close. The admins on Citizendium are so sensitive to criticism that they actively ban contributors like David Gerard for the crime of offering constructive criticism on a website, other than citizendium. If a project is not big enough to look into a mirror and see what is wrong, it doesn't IMO deserve to have a future.

On topic, I think Citizendium should just be re-merged into Wikipedia, however Wikipedia should definitely have a rating on its topic entries for estimated accuracy. Or, there could be some "Citizendium Seal Of Approval" on Wikipedia entries, so that we know the level of review.

The article fails to recognize that the Wikipedia of today is not the same one it was in 2006. Though it doesn't just accept special authority of a given contributor (like an academic) there are much more robust procedures in place to ensure that content becomes stable, and there is the possibility of building credibility on the site.

I think the real story of Citizendium's demise is that Wikipedia addressed a number of the issues that prompted its creation in the first place.

Tim, as the author of the article you should have interviewed someone other than Hayford Peirce, who of course, consistently refuses to shoulder any responsibility on why citizendium failed to take off.

I'm not an expert on the minutia of CZ internal politics. I asked Sanger to put me in touch with "the best person to speak on behalf of the project." He put me in touch with Dan Nessett, who in turn referred me to Peirce. And of course I talked to Sanger, who offered a more positive assessment of CZ's accomplishments than Peirce did. I imagine there are as many perspectives as there are CZ editors, but there are only so many hours in the day.

The only way this site could be more awkward is if it was Citizenenendendium. And even after reading the article I still don't honestly get the title, since the whole concept seems kind of elitist. Maybe most of us aren't citizens in that sense?

What's worth noting, and it's what makes Wikipedia's discussion pages so fun, is that sometimes experts believe some pretty backwards or ludicrous things. Maybe it's helpful for them to argue with the rabble. Builds character, keeps the blood flowin'.

On topic, I think Citizendium should just be re-merged into Wikipedia, however Wikipedia should definitely have a rating on its topic entries for estimated accuracy. Or, there could be some "Citizendium Seal Of Approval" on Wikipedia entries, so that we know the level of review.

Nice idea in theory, you only have to spend 30 minutes on Citizendium to see how utterly dysfunctional and useless the whole project is. They spent all their time bickering and nitpicking over who fits in where in their hierarchy instead of doing anything useful.

A few points:

The whole of Citizendium has a grand total of 156 approved articles. The last time any article was approved was in December 2010. Many of the pages have calls to go vote in a referendum that was closed in July. I found one page that had a link to a more recent referendum but that one closed on 7 October.One of the few active pages is their article on Wikipedia. As with many other wannabee sites this article is focused on pointing out Wikipedia's flaws and extolling the virtues of their own project.Like all bureaucracies, they spend the vast majority of their time meeting, arguing and passing motions (42 in 2011 so far) instead of doing anything useful.

They've spent four years and lots of money sniffing each other's farts and feeling important, while producing nothing of any value.

Maybe the expert panels should have been consulted on the name Citizendium before this embarrassment was released to the public. Try saying "Citizendium" five times real fast, now try "wikipedia", hell I still can't say it or spell it with out looking at or copying and pasting it for this comment. Five minutes from now I won't remember it even exists.

There's another term for this in the software engineering field: Worse is Better. By making it simpler to participate, even with its flaws, it makes a more widely accessible product, and it got to market first. It doesn't matter how 'good' the other technology/website/whatever is.

> I still don't honestly get the title, since the whole concept seems kind of elitist

That's the reason I never took it seriously. And I say that as the author of some 5000 articles on the Wikipedia.

The long and short of it is that the "experts" on the topics of my interest area, tech history, were terrible sources. They generally fell into two groups, those who were "historical" and had no idea of the tech they were writing about and made gross errors as a result, or those who were "technical" and wrote incredibly dense articles that focused on some minute detail and ignored all the history and greater context.

I started on the Wiki because it seemed I could apply my minor talents, which essentially come down to google-fu, to an area that I thought was simply being ignored and might be the single most important area to focus on. So I write articles like this:

Which I would argue is, by far, the most detailed *and* in-depth on both the historical and technical sides of any article on the topic ever published in the lay press. If you're curious, writing this article required emailing dozens of people, getting releases from the RAF Museum, getting photocopies of the original operator's manual sent to me via snail mail, and holding a video chat with someone so I could test if my understanding of the mechanical system was duplicated on the read device.

Yes, I am a hopeless braggart. And you, for the cost of listening to be chuff myself every so often, get to read 5000 new articles on Spacewar! to Space debris.

So on Citizendium I would have to cow tow to someone who's articles I think suck? No.

That's not to say the Wiki is any shining light either, as it is being quickly mil-specced by a growing group of people who spend many many times more effort talking to each other than writing articles. But I just ignore them and keep writing. I'll get angry if and when that is no longer possible.